Hostile, Trivial Look At Mapplethorpe

BOIGRAPHY

Patricia Morrisroe's biography of Robert Mapplethorpe is a malicious, unpleasant book in which a collection of perfectly awful people are displayed in all their pettiness, self-importance, blind ambition and wild selfishness.

Like most mean-spirited gossip, the stuff here is funny, shocking, visceral, quick and horrendously engrossing.

Mapplethorpe was born in 1946 to a vaguely repressive Catholic family in Floral Park, N.Y. He escaped as soon as he could, studying art at the Pratt Institute, where he met poet and rock singer Patti Smith, who remained his truest companion.

They were lovers for some time; when she left him, he began the voyage into gay identity that would be the cornerstone of his art and his life, although they continued for some time to share a loft at the Chelsea Hotel.

Mapplethorpe worked at that time in a variety of media, but he ultimately settled on photography, and he became famous for his work in three modes: exquisite neoclassical photos of flowers; portraits of the rich and famous and powerful people whose company he relished; and unabashed documents of the gay sadomasochism scene.

The flowers earned money; the portraits earned social position; and the S&M photos were the art, the place where all his passion was invested. These last remain shocking, but they always have a certain icy formality to them - a studied balance and clarity and detachment not present in his life. He developed AIDS just as his career was skyrocketing.

Shortly after his death in 1989, his grand retrospective, The Perfect Moment, became the center of a national debate on art and pornography; the director of the Corcoran Gallery canceled the show's visit to Washington (and was subsequently pressured into resigning), and the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center and its director were brought before a court on obscenity charges (they were ultimately acquitted).

The attempts to censor his Perfect Moment exhibition have clearly given him a place in the American public consciousness that his skill as an artist could not have earned for him, and it is no doubt time for revisionist readings of his work that take him down a peg.

But Morrisroe's assessment is not so much revisionist as hostile. Morrisroe consistently undermines Mapplethorpe's work by reading it as nothing more than a manifestation of his icky life.

The tone of the book is uneven: Morrisroe writes rather wittily for a few pages, and then plunges into a kind of trademark randomness, in which she may either repeat information she has already given or allude to information her readers need and don't have.

No one comes out of this book well, but if Mapplethorpe comes out badly, Morrisroe comes out even worse. In her rage to paint the triviality of her subjects, Morrisroe indulges in that same triviality.